Thursday 15 January 2015

"It is never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot

At Bonaventure Cemetery. Not anyone I actually know.
"It is never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot 

Part two of my photography bio. This is the hard part, the personal part.

My grandmother was a photographer. My mother's mother. She was good too. This was in an era of dark rooms, chemical developing, and actually knowing how to use the aperture on a film camera. She took amazing pictures- of her children, landscapes, of things happening.

My grandmother was also abusive to her children, enough that two of them danced on her grave when she died. Their memories of her photography are tainted by this abuse. To me she was a doting grandmother when I was a child and a sickly old woman with a temper and dementia when I was a teenager. She once grabbed me, by my neck, from across Thanksgiving dinner to accuse me of being a lesbian because I invited my female best friend to eat with us that holiday. I know she was mean and violent and I never doubted any of the stories told about her.

I know that she handed out a lot of pain to people in her lifetime. I have a difficult time sifting through all the memories of my family though because every single person was also a liar when it came to telling it to us as children.

For example: A drunken uncle once told us he had secret documents relating to the JFK assassination taped to the back of a picture at his house. Later he told us that our grandmother was the Babushka lady, the lady with the headscarf seen unflinchingly taking photos of the assassination and that no one has yet tracked down.

She was in Denver when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Another family member claimed that Melba was actually Princess Anastasia of Russia and showed us a hand typed autobiography that she had written about her escape to America.

She wasn't even born yet when the Tzar's family was killed.

It was all bullshit. Intertwined with accusations of child rape, drug abuse, and other illegal harms. We believed it all, as children often do. There are no dinosaur gizzard stones that the Smithsonian tried to buy. The Life magazine didn't steal anyone's negatives. My grandmother was not the elusive babushka photographer nor was she Anastasia.

So when one of my family members reminds me that my grandmother was a photographer too? That my work reminds them of her daring work? It is very much not a compliment. It is the worst insult they can think of in the moment, a sweet and subtle emotional stab wound to the heart. No one overhearing the conversation could know what horribleness that drips from such words, but I do.

I write poetry like my grandfather and photograph the world like my grandmother. I still have all my fingers though and I try really hard to be the end of abuse in a line of awful mothers, cherishing my children and being mindful of the power and cruelty of words as well as hands.

I am sure I take more after my aunt than I do any of the others in my family, not just because she is one of three people from that side that still talk to me. I hope I also take after my dad's side too, I know I look quite a lot like his grandmother Madeline. But how much of this inheritance actually matters? I am not them. I have my own life experiences that have shaped me, my own abuses, loves, and travels.

I am not them.

This is the anchor that holds me to the seafloor when pursuing photography as an art. Twisting and twining of seaweed and rusty chains, these associations are what hold me back- not just in art but in writing too. When I dredge up these family and childhood memories, they are not just mine and it picks at the wounds of everyone involved. I can only hope that they all understand that I tell my own history, tell my own stories, and that telling them sometimes keeps me up at night.

This is the photo bomb that I was thinking of yesterday. Legacy and letdown. The phoenix rising from the ashes of a dysfunctional history.

Can I take from this and create some new legacy without whitewashing the histories that brought us here? What is it that is said in writing?
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
-- Anne Lamott”

It isn't too late for me to be a photographer, a poet, a memoirist. It isn't too late for any of it.

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